How To Setup a Twitter Contest

Before we get into the twitter contests and how what we can do to get you started, I want to go over some basics on twitter so you can have a better feel for the real purpose of twitter.

What everyone knows about twitter:

1. They want lots of followers
2. They can post micro blogs of about 140 characters about anything
3. There is a cute bird associated with the word “twitter”

What most people thing twitter is about:

1. It can make their business grow
2. People will trust them more if they have more followers
3. That they will get great backlinks from twitter since it is such an authority site.

Some Truths about Twitter Marketing:

Can Twitter Grow Your Online Business With Lots of Followers?

Anything is possible with twitter and there are many success stories out there to prove it. However, just because you have a ton of followers does not mean you are gaining in your online business. Twitter marketing goes beyond just having followers, you must engage with your followers and give them a reason to seek you out. Do a search for the Conan O’Brian Twitter / Sarah Killen. Read about how his 1 tweet to her changed her life forever! Then think about what you can do.

Will Your Tweets and Followers Equal a Trust Factor?

Sure, if you are some famous that everyone knows beyond twitter, otherwise you could be anybody out there. Again, this comes down to your creative thought and your time and effort into your twitter marketing plan (or have you not thought that far ahead?).

Okay, hopefully by now you are thinking about the true purpose of twitter and how to really use it. Think of twitter like a TV show or Radio broadcast. You have a chance to create a real audience, but not just by gaining in followers and adding funny tweets here and there. You need a way to get people to come back over and again.

Will Your Twitter Account Help You in SEO?

I prefer not to think of twitter as a normal social marketing tool for SEO purposes. First off, the links to your site from twitter are set as”no follow” links. So the clicks count and that is of course helpful to show SE’s that you can get traffic from sites that don’t count as backlinks, however that is as far as it goes in SEO.

Twitter is more Viral if you have not figured it out by now. Viral is similar to spreading germs right! Yeah, you get a theme going with your twitter that gets people to interact with you and now you are on the “viral” road to success.

This leads me into twitter contests. This is a great way to get people interacting with you on twitter, sending out messages to their followers and helping to spread the word about you and your company. Tony Eldridge has put together a complete step by step guide on how to setup an effective campaign. He even gives ideas on how to get products and services donated from other business sites to help conduct his campaigns successfully. Now, you can set up a contest anyway you want, but my personal take on this is if you can give away something related to your business or even one of your products or services you can then generate a way of testing out the level of interest in what you are promoting.

Lets say you setup a contest to give away a brand new set of cloths from your online clothing store. To your amazement 100′s of people want to win this! Well if you have a successful campaign running and have a way to follow up with all the entries you may end up giving away merchandise to a few winners, but you may also gain an opportunity to get more sales from those who didn’t win by offering them a consolation prize of a 10% discount?

Watch this video from Tony Eldridge and if this makes sense to you purchase his twitter contest course!